


all my bones are begging me to beg for you (for your love)

by dontflipyourlyd



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, F/F, Minor Barry Bluejeans/Lup, Minor Carey/Killian (The Adventure Zone), Minor Kravitz/Taako (The Adventure Zone), Polyamory, i would kill for lucretia, lucretia is a lesbian but lup has two hands, major spoilers for the adventure zone
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-19
Updated: 2018-04-19
Packaged: 2019-04-24 08:43:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,284
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14351967
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dontflipyourlyd/pseuds/dontflipyourlyd
Summary: What could have happened, what should have happened, and what did happen between Lup and Lucretia.AKA, Lucretia deserves a happy ending.





	all my bones are begging me to beg for you (for your love)

**Author's Note:**

> Do not read this if you haven't finished TAZ: Balance, because spoilers. 
> 
> Many thanks to the McElroy brothers, especially Griffin for creating the two leading ladies of my life.

**What could have happened is this:**

In her notation of year 101, Lucretia didn’t write about the last time she saw Lup before she never saw her again. Her notebook had been filling with names, the people killed by the relics. _How had they not realized?_ They’d lit the fuses of magical dynamite, and tossed them down to the world they floated above?

She didn’t need to connect their memories to the acid-fueled words she’d spit at Lup, and she couldn’t bring herself to record the look on Lup’s face before she’d turned away.

It had started with Form 19-3-A, Faerun’s Certificate of Legal Marriage Between Two Humanoid Creatures, sliding onto Lucretia’s desk. “For safe-keeping,” Lup had said. Lucretia stared at it, at Lup and Barry’s full names legally entwined. Over the last fifty years, she’d saved their twenty-seven marriage certificates with the due diligence required by her job. And this, the twenty-eighth, was no different - yet everything was different.

Lucretia didn’t respond. Fisher hummed in his tank.

“What’s wrong?” Lup said. She leaned against Lucretia’s desk, reaching out to push her fingers through Lucretia’s curling mop of hair. Her hand, always warm, rested on Lucretia’s neck, thumb tracing circles on her pulse point. “Is it the names?”

“I didn’t know you were getting married again,” Lucretia said. She couldn’t bring herself to sound anything brighter than numb, or to touch the too-clean paper. Her skin felt too small.

Lucretia felt Lup shrug. She still couldn’t look up. “We figured, might as well, if we’re going to be here forever.” Lup’s voice was too airy, too glib to be purely genuine, but the ring - back on her finger after the last few cycles being in a box on Barry’s dresser - didn’t lie. “Are you upset you didn’t get an invitation?”

Lucretia couldn’t help but let out a laugh, one that was out of control and ended in a half-sob. Lup’s thumb stilled, and then her hand pulled away. Lucretia had to stand, to push back her chair, carefully put it back.

She forced herself to look Lup in the eyes, and for the first time in a century she didn’t want Lup there.

“Lucretia, please talk to me.” Lup dropped the lighter tone.

“I guess that’s it, then.” Her tone was acidic. In the back of her mind, she knew she sounded like Taako at his worst, and she hated it.

“I have no idea what you mean,” Lup said, and her shoulders were set for a fight. Her eyes were shining brown, too wet. When she blinked, her eyelashes were dark and stuck together.

The words spilled out of Lucretia’s mouth, burning like bile. “Am I just the girl you fuck so you can say you’re gay?”

Lup didn’t reel back, but her eyebrow furrowed and her lips pressed together a moment before she responded, tone even but with a razor-sharp edge that would have made Lucretia flinch in any other moment. “Why the _fuck_ would you _say_ that?”

“Maybe because I’ve been here for the last hundred years.” Lucretia ripped her eyes away, looking back at the form on her desk, at the list of names in her notebook. “I’ve been _right here_.”

“You’re not fucking entitled to me,” Lup said. “I can’t believe I have tell that to you, of all people-”

“I never said that,” Lucretia said. “I never- I would never-”

“Well what the fuck did you want me to think?” Lup demanded, louder.

“I wanted you to think about marrying me,” Lucretia said. “Just once. One time. What am I supposed to think when you say - when you say you love me, when you say you won’t prioritize Barry over me, or me over him - and then you marry him twenty eight times, and I never - never -” Her voice broke, and she swallowed down the shards of glass. “What am I supposed to think?”

“You’re supposed to be happy for me.”

“Did I ever say I wasn’t?” Lucretia said. “I’m happy for you every time. I am so happy that you have Barry-”

“You’re not fucking acting like it,” Lup snapped.

“Does loving you mean I’m not allowed to love myself? To think about what I want?” The whole conversation screeched towards a precipice, and Lucretia couldn’t stop it. “Because then I’m not sure if it’s worth it.”

* * *

 

**What should have happened is this:**

“I love you, by the way,” Lucretia said, and Lup turned too fast to have heard her slippered footsteps.

“What are you still doing awake?” The moon hung, a fingernail sliver, outside the kitchen window, barely lighting Lup’s face. Lucretia had memorized it by now, not only the shape of her hairline and the arch of her eyebrow but the bags under her eyes and the torn skin of her lips. She didn’t need light.

“I’m still working on the names from today,” Lucretia said, shuffling towards the tea kettle. Lup turned, positioning herself in front of something she had been leaning over as Lucretia came in. “What were you writing?”

“Nothing important.”

Lucretia only needed to look at Lup, and the other woman sighed, pushing the paper along the table so it was next to her, rather than behind. _Back soon_ , it read.

“I need to go,” Lup said. “I need to fix what I broke.”

“Alone?”

“I’m the one who made us promise,” Lup said, “Year 17, in the automaton city. I’m a hypocrite if I don’t do this.”

Lucretia listened to the click of the stove, watched the flames reach towards the kettle. She turned, leaned against the counter. Lup’s arms were crossed over her chest, and she was staring at a half-full jar of sugar next to the stove, in Lucretia’s direction but unable to meet her gaze. She wanted to embrace her until the coldness left Lup’s heart or the raging fury burnt itself out, but there were thousands of reasons why now was not the time. “Alone?”

“Lucretia, you don’t - you don’t understand. Your staff can’t burn down an entire city. It doesn’t leave marks in the countryside, it doesn’t destroy everything - you can’t understand -  I need to fix my mistake.”

“Alone?”

“Stop _saying_ _that_ ,” Lup said, and her hands formed fists. She could obliterate Lucretia with a single gesture, if she wanted.

“We did this as a group,” Lucretia said, voice firm as she turned, took her mug from the cupboard. “If we’re doing anything to fix it, it needs to be as a group, too. Do you think Merle is doing any better? Barry? Taako? Me?”

“Your staff -”

“It contains the Light, just like your gauntlet. People will kill each other for it all the same.” Her head was bowed as she chose a tea bag, ripped the packet open carefully. “And we don’t know what kind of person is using its protection.” Lucretia reached for the sugar, and Lup was already there, pushing the jar towards her. Their hands brushed. The water began to simmer.

Lucretia turned her body completely towards Lup, and her heart pulled taut at the look in her eyes, the halo of her hair in the moonlight. Their first kiss had been on a night like this - quiet conversation in the kitchen, late at night, a moment of heavy silence before they leaned together like two saplings under a duvet of snow.  

“I’m sorry,” Lup said, and her shoulders hunched.

 _There’s nothing to be sorry for._ Lucretia turned her hands out for Lup to take, and she did, moving into her orbit to wrap her arms around Lucretia’s waist, pressing her forehead into her shoulder. She didn’t cry, but Lucretia felt her shuddering and held her tight to keep her together.

She pressed a kiss to the top of Lup’s head, felt the ends of hair tickling her hands. “You don’t need to be sorry, love,” she said, voice low. “Just… stop acting like Magnus, alright?”

Lup choked out a weak laugh, burrows her head further into Lucretia’s shoulder as if she could stand there all night. Lucretia felt a few tears fall, but didn’t mention it, rather leaning against the counter to better support Lup.

Lup only moved away - slowly, reluctantly - when the tea kettle began to whistle. “I could have sped that up, you know,” she said as Lucretia turned off the stove, poured water over the tea bag. Even though she no longer leaned on Lucretia, she still hovered close, fingers trailing over Lucretia’s ancient sleep shirt.

“You know I don’t like to cheat like that.”

“I know.” Lup pressed a kiss to her shoulder.

Lucretia added half a spoonful of sugar to her tea, stirred four times, and dropped the spoon into the sink. “Are you going to go back to bed now?”

“Can I come back to your room?”

“I still have work to do,” Lucretia said.

Lup nodded, looked away. Lucretia reached out, cups her neck, runs her thumb over the thudding of her pulse.  

“That doesn’t mean no. Pick up your note so nobody thinks you went missing and come to bed.”

* * *

 

**What actually happened was this:**

In Faerun, ten years contains 3,652 days, and Lucretia can’t fully think about Lup on every one of them. Directing the Bureau is more than a full-time job, and her employees need a leader more than a woman with a broken heart and furrowed skin around her eyes.  

Truthfully, Lucretia doesn’t remember the last thing she said to Lup before she was gone. It was at a meal, she remembers, which she had stopped recording moment-for-moment in year eighteen, after the two hundredth argument about Fantasy Pop-Tarts. It was at a meal, she remembers, which she’d had millions of with her family. Nobody had thought twice about it until a week afterwards. What had they eaten? What was Lup’s last meal? Lucretia doesn’t remember.

One moment, Lup slept down the hall, and the next she was lost on the wind. This only helped Lucretia push her plan along, the one that had been stitching together in the back of her mind over the last few months of watching her family fall apart. She began to black out information the day Taako threw a glass at the mirror in his bedroom, splintering it with a crash that rang through the silent ship.

“It’s too quiet on this ship,” he told Magnus when the fighter rushed to his aid. Lucretia saw the hollow daze in Taako’s eyes, the scratches from broken glass on his hands, and knew she couldn’t do nothing anymore. Even though she couldn’t save Lup, protect her behind a magical shield of shimmering blue, she could still save Lup’s brother.

\---

She tries not to think about what happens next.

\---

Three months after the defeat of the Hunger, Lucretia still hasn’t been alone in a room with Lup. This is a fate of her own design, a punishment for not seeking her out. How could she have let Lup languish in a cave for years? How could she not have known how close she was, ensconced in fabric and wood?

She remembered the moment, pausing before slashing through Lup’s name with black ink. The first had been hesitant, through a note about a recipe Lup and Taako had taught her. (She had to let Taako keep his cooking. It was part of the plan, but also - it was the only thing she could leave behind of Lup.) Through the notebooks, her fingers grew confident - Lup was no longer a name, a woman, a lover, only letters. L U P.

\---

Three months later, Taako refuses to react as if Lucretia were there, and Lucretia can hardly blame him.

\---

Six months before Carey and Killian’s wedding, Lucretia wakes up to an insistent flashing red in her Stone of Far Speech. She raises it to her ear.

“Lucretia.”

The recording is a cheery voice, throaty and chiming. “Madame Director,” Lup says with relish. “I would like to request a moment of your time this morning, if you don’t mind.” Lucretia’s eyes fall on her calendar, stuffed full of appointments. “Call me back if you need further convincing.”

She does, but there is no response. The Stone has only just touched onto the bed where Lucretia tossed it when a rip in space burns open and Lup steps through. Her Reaping uniform is snug at her waist, and her usually wild hair is in a braid over her shoulder. Her cloak is over her arm. Lucretia has not gotten out of bed yet.

Lup grins at her, disappearing the scythe in her hand and sitting on the bed next to her. “Long time no see.” She takes Lucretia’s necklace from her nightstand, plays with the chain without losing eye contact.

“I didn’t realize you meant a meeting out of the office,” Lucretia says.

“I was in the neighborhood-”

“You came here from the void.”

“And figured I’d drop by, save your secretary some ink in your appointment book.”

“I don’t have a secretary.”

Lup frowns. “Why not? You should have a secretary. You’re an important woman, Madame Director. You shouldn’t have to deal with all of the riff raff who wants to talk to you.” She winks, lasciviously. “And I know how you like a woman in a uniform.”

Lucretia’s heart skips. She struggles to keep her face still, her voice dry. “I resent the implication that I would make my secretary wear a uniform.”

Lup giggles, her nose crinkling, and pokes Lucretia’s knee. “Oh, do you?”  

The silence hangs in the air like a gossamer spiderweb between the two of them. Lucretia’s eyes drop for a split second to Lup’s lips (slightly chapped) and her neck (smooth, with a mole right under her chin).

She looks away. “Did you come here with an actual issue or just to make me late?”

Lucretia hears the clink of her necklace onto the headstand again, and looks back to see Lup reach into the inside of her vest and pull out a small card, on thick cardstock. She recognizes it - a similar one is currently front and center on her fridge, unfilled out.

* * *

 

To the Wedding of Killian Crushbone and Carey Fangbattle:

 

___ I, ________ WILL be attending ALONE

___ I, ________ WILL be attending, with a guest __________

___ I, ________ WILL NOT be attending

 

* * *

 

Lup has checked that she will be attending, with guest Barry Bluejeans. Lucretia is not surprised.

“Yes, the stationary is beautiful. They got it through a friend of mine - do you need to know where to get it? For yours and Barry’s…” She can’t say _wedding_.

“Where’s yours?”

“My fridge-”

Lup makes a smaller tear in space than she’d stepped out of, reaches through it, pulls through Lucretia’s card and a small Goldcliffe magnet.

“Should I tell Kravitz you’re using your powers for this?”

“He knows. He yells at me for it. I remind him that I was there when he manifested as a giant crystal golem to scare the fuck out of the boys. He shuts his mouth.”

Lucretia huffs a laugh, and Lup smiles brilliantly in response. She puts the card down on the bed, grabs a pen from the nightstand.

“What were you going to answer?”

“I’m attending, obviously.”

“Alone?”

“Yes.”

“Or,” Lup says, and Lucretia has known since year 34 that this was Lup’s nervous voice, “or you could take me.”

Lucretia stares at her. “You already have a date.” 

“I want two.”

“If you want extra food, I’m sure the chef, _your brother_ , can manage to swing that.”

“I don’t want extra food,” Lup says, then pauses. “Well, I mean, I do, but that’s only a plus. It’s not the main reason-”

“What do you want from me?” Lucretia asks.

Lup gives Lucretia an exasperated look. “I want you to take me to the wedding, Lucretia. I want you to talk to me and dance with me and look smokin’ hot and let me walk you home.” She is heart-breakingly earnest. “I want to kiss you good night. I want to see you the next morning, and the morning after.”

This is a flood over Lucretia’s heart after ten years and six months of drought. Lucretia can’t speak louder than a whisper for fear that she’ll crack wide open. “I want that too.”

Lup smiles again, a slow flame catching on dry pine needles.

“But I don’t deserve you.”

Lup’s smile freezes. “Why not?”

“I’m sure Taako will remind you of my crimes against all of existence, and him in particular.” It is surreal that they’re talking about this, now - the breaking of silence with a screech. Lucretia isn’t completely dressed, and she feels it acutely.

Lup shakes her head. “I know. He’s said-”

“He’s right,” Lucretia says.

“He’s _wrong,_ ” Lup says, and her chin tilts up in defiance. “He said you couldn’t have loved me if you took me away.”

Lucretia swallows, looks away. “I understand why he thinks that.”

“You can’t tell me he’s still right. Because that means you didn’t love me. And that you don’t love me.” Lup’s voice splinters. “And that can’t be true.”

Lucretia still can’t look at her face, so she stares at Lup’s hands, curled and shaking in her lap. “It’s not true,” Lucretia says, quiet and as steady as she can manage without choking on the truth. “I did- do- love you. That’s the problem. I love you too much-”

Lup reaches out, index and middle finger under Lucretia’s chin to guide her eyes up to meet Lup’s gaze. “Lucretia,” she says. “This is the ending you deserve.”

\---

Lucretia wears powder blue to the wedding, and Barry wears a navy blue suit. Lup wears red, of course, and clutches both of their hands as Carey and Killian embrace. She gives both of them corsages, on the gaudy side of enormous and shimmering with glitter that stays on Lucretia’s skin for weeks. 

Lup mostly dances to fast songs with Taako, performs years-old choreography with Magnus, and wins a dance-off against Merle in the middle of the floor. She glows with life, and Barry and Lucretia sit their table and cheer their girl on, sharing a bottle of champagne.

For the first slow dance, Lup pulls Barry into the center of the floor, their fingers interlocked. She wraps her hands arms around his neck, his hands fall around her waist, and their foreheads rest together. Lucretia watches Lup’s fingertips playing with the fringe of Barry’s hair touching his neck, and the smile on her face. She didn’t look away. 

For the last slow dance, Lup takes Lucretia’s hand, tugs her to the other side of the dance floor, wraps her arms around Lucretia’s waist and pulls her close.

Lucretia rests her forehead on the top of Lup’s head. “Hi,” she says, quiet. 

“I’m glad you’re back,” Lup says. “I’m glad I have my Lucretia back.” She looks up at Lucretia, raises herself up for a fast, sweet kiss. 

It didn’t feel like the first kiss they’d had in eleven years. It felt like Lup is leaving for work, and Lucretia knows she’d be coming back in eight hours. 

After a minute, Lup speaks again. “Do you want to have this some day?” Her head rests against Lucretia’s chest. “A wedding, I mean.” 

“Not Barry?” The music plays on. Lup is silent for a moment, then presses a kiss into Lucretia’s collarbone. 

“No,” she says, and Lucretia floats, heart fluttering in a gust of wind. 

“No?” 

“He and I,” Lup says, “we have eternity together. That was the agreement.” She looks up at Lucretia, gaze steady, determinedly fond. “So unless you’ve changed your mind-” 

“I haven’t.” 

“Then I’m yours for as long as you live.”

**Author's Note:**

> Follow me on Twitter @lesbianlucretia or on Tumblr at hashtagmambonumberfive.


End file.
